The toxoplasma of rage (article)

“Nobody makes an IRC channel for no reason. Who are we doing this versus?” — topic of #slatestarcodex I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water b…

Very interesting article. Takes Ferguson shooting, college rape allegations and the PETA stuff, and tries to posit a scientific-ish explanation as to why these things always devolve into shouting matches centered around the most controversial cases.

No pithy clips or quotes this time. Just read the damn article. It's pretty good.

pretty much everybody who knows anything about factory farming is upset by it.

Heh. Happy to be the exception.

I'm the sort who doesn't consider it a meal if it ain't mostly meat. I think PETA is stupid. But I don't have a problem with them offering to pay water bills if people stop eating meat.

OTOH, this bullshit angers me:

ey is very rich but because ey really needs glasses.

At first I thought it was a typo, but then they did it again.

...If the Catholic had merely chosen not to murder...

That was a bit of sloppy reasoning. The murder thing is totally banal, because everyone agrees with that. The condoms are something not everyone agrees with, so it's a more useful thing. I don't know WTF the "Consequentialism FAQ" is, but it seems kinda dumb.

“Rape culture” doesn’t mean most people like rape, it means most people ignore it.

Huh? No, it's a manufactured thing (in the US, other places have some real problems with actual rape culture) that uses a scandalous claim to grab attention and further misandry in general.

My second thought was “But when people are competing to see who can come up with the wittiest and most hilarious quip about why we should disbelieve rape victims, something has gone horribly wrong.” My third thought was the same as my second thought, but in ALL CAPS, because at that point I had read the replies at the bottom.

Thus proving that he didn't understand Instapundit or what was going on with respect to the UVA hoax.

controversial by Tumblr standards

Heh...I LOL'd when I read that.

Here's my tl;dr; for the article: People are interested in interesting things. Some imaginative examples provided.

Here's my tl;dr; for the article: People are interested in interesting things. Some imaginative examples provided.

Are you pretending not to get the point in order to downplay the article/author/(ancillary beliefs expressed by the author)/(beliefs vaguely hinted that the author might hold)? Or did you really not understand?

Maybe I didn't understand. Did you get something more profound than that? Or are you just trolling me?

My tl;dr of that point would be something like:

People form their views of the world from well-publicized cases, which tend to be controversial (and often dubious or fall in gray-areas), and when they don't accurately represent the reality of all cases, people end up with twisted views of the world.

That's a bit more substantive than "People are interested in interesting things".

And there was also the bits about moral signaling and the double-bind advocacy groups end up in.

I don't disagree with that. I just collapsed all that stuff into "interesting," which is a bit broader and includes stuff like the Kardashians (and the fact that millions of people find them interesting make them interesting despite any particular hipster declaring themselves unimpressed).

So maybe my tldr isn't as accurate for the article, but I guess I got distracted by all the stupid stuff in there.

Celebrities are well-known because they are unusual, and because they are unusual, they misrepresent people in general and this can artificially divide people over issues that would have more mutual agreement if only average people were considered.

Yeah ok, I'm not into the author's ideologies either. But the insight into why the kind of stories that gain social media wings are oftentimes poor representatives of the issues they are tied with is spot on.

But the insight into why the kind of stories that gain social media wings are oftentimes poor representatives of the issues they are tied with is spot on.

Quite. The article's a long one, but well worth reading for that point alone -- it's something that pervades both the traditional and the social media-political complexes, and provides great insight into what's really driving the wedge between Red and Blue -- and even the proto-Grays, to the point where we are seriously risking our ability to meaningfully impact problems simply by bringing them up in the broader framework of social discourse.